… “I think it was just, when you’re up a set and 2-0 and you see the finish line, and I think you get ahead of yourself,” Kamau Murray, Stephens’ coach, told ESPN.com. “All of a sudden, you look up, and it’s 2-2 again, and you’re down 3-2, and the calmness sort of left. It’s a lesson learned. She had a lot of opportunities in the second, from 2-2 all the way to 4-all, every game was 30-all, and she definitely had the match on her racket. Next go around, she’s definitely got to do a better job of finishing.”
Halep said she told herself to relax, enjoy it and not worry about the possibility she might lose a fourth Grand Slam final. “Then when I started to win games, I said that last year [it] happened to me, same thing, I was [a] set and a break up [against Jelena Ostapenko], and I lost the match,” Halep said. “So I said there is a chance to come back and win it. So I believed in that and my game was more relaxed. I could make more things on court, and that’s why I could win.”
… When I covered the Pirates as a newspaperman, one of their philosophies when it came to prospects was that it was better to target a hit-tool first over power, the idea being that power could be more easily developed while bat-to-ball skills were more innate. What’s interesting is that Dickerson has dramatically improved his hit tool — and in short order.
In Pittsburgh last week, I asked Dickerson just how he pulled this off.
“It would get too deep for you,” said Dickerson, breaking into a grin before his locker.
Humor me, I pleaded.
“I’m all about change,” Dickerson said. “Looking at the analytics, I saw that I swung through a lot of fastballs… I kind of went to it myself. ‘How could I get better?’ It’s a trail… With how good my hand-eye [coordination] is, there’s no reason why I should take big cuts and miss those opportunities, because I have a really good two-strike approach.”
As Spain’s midfielder prepares for his final World Cup he discusses how he spent his last minutes at Barcelona, the times he hit near-perfection and how football in his village shaped him
To examine the usefulness of sleep hygiene education on the sleep of professional rugby league athletes during a 10-week period of the competitive season. Design
Case study. Participants
Twenty-four professional rugby league athletes. Measurements
Initially, participants were monitored for a 2-week period using wrist activity monitors allowing baseline estimation of sleep. Following this, 12 athletes attended two 30-minute sleep hygiene education seminars delivered over successive weeks, whereas the remaining 12 athletes received no education. Sleep was monitored in all athletes across the 2-week education period and for a 2-week period 1 month following the end of education. Split-plot analysis of variance and paired t tests were used to examine differences in sleep across the duration of the investigation. Results
An initial sleep hygiene education seminar resulted in an earlier bedtime (effect size [ES] = 0.53 ± 0.48), more time in bed (ES = 0.53 ± 0.49), and increased sleep duration (ES = 0.47 ± 0.44). A second sleep hygiene education seminar resulted in more time in bed (ES = 0.84 ± 0.50) but a reduction in sleep efficiency (ES = 1.15 ± 0.48). One month following sleep hygiene education, sleep behavior was comparable to that observed at baseline. Conclusion
This study shows that sleep hygiene education can lead to positive changes in sleep behavior. However, changes in sleep from education may not be sustained following the initial intervention.
When England right-back Kyle Walker takes to the field against Tunisia on June 18 he’ll be making his 54th appearance for club and country this season. That’s a lot of football, more than 3,400 minutes in all. But Walker is not even especially unusual – Leo Messi has played 60 games already, and Croatian defender Duje Caleta-Car has clocked up more than 5,000 minutes this season.
So what happens when, in a World Cup year, already tired players have to extend their season by an additional six to eight weeks and play up to ten more games?
Keeping footballers in perfect shape is particularly tricky as the matches come thick and fast. Research has shown that players are more likely to get injured when games are separated by less than four days. Post-match recovery is therefore crucial – and it’s an issue that colleagues and I recently looked at in our research.
Coaches in professional sports have more technology at their fingertips than ever before. In 2018, it is possible to track virtually every aspect of an athlete’s fitness, training and performance. The aim is to put the individual, and ultimately the team, in the best position to succeed. Applied correctly, the advantages can be huge.
Just how to do this effectively at the elite level was a subject broached by Arsenal Lead Sports Scientist, Tom Allen, at Firstbeat’s recent 2018 HRV Summit.
… It’s not easy to hear criticism, no matter how constructive or well-intentioned. The truth, as they say, can hurt. But Los Angeles Clippers Coach Doc Rivers had this to say about athletes and criticism: “Average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached. Great players want to be told the truth.”
That willingness to receive honest feedback is perhaps the primary characteristic of the coachable athlete. “The coachable athlete,” Drake emphasizes, is willing to be told in what areas they will need to improve. When the coach says, ’You need to get better at this,’ they say, ‘What do I need to do?’”
… In the past 20 years the use of GPS wearables in sport has grown dramatically. Catapult Sports, a sports-technology company, developed its first prototype in 2000: a 3-inch tube. “We thought it was amazing we could get that sort of information from something so small,” says Allan Hahn, one of the scientists involved in the project. “Of course, by current standards, it was huge. We had to tape it to the athletes with elastic bandage straps.” Today, Catapult is used by more than 100 football teams worldwide, 19 American football teams, 18 basketball franchises, including the Golden State Warriors, the reigning world champions from California, as well as high-performance institutes that support Olympic teams in over 25 countries.
Although wearable GPS devices have been a common sight on training grounds for a while, they have been deployed in competitive matches only recently. In February 2015 the International Football Association Board approved the use of electronic tracking in official fixtures, just in time for that year’s Women’s World Cup, hosted by Canada. In March 2018 FIFA announced that team analysts were now also allowed to transmit data and communicate with coaches during the match itself.
Wireless radio signals can be used to monitor a person’s precise movements through a solid wall, thanks to artificial intelligence. The technology could help us monitor people for health and safety less intrusively—but it also raises a range of security and privacy issues.
Sean O’Connor’s phone lit up with notifications following last year’s All-Ireland football final. He’s not a Dublin fan, it was not people congratulating him on the three-in-a-row. He’s not a Mayo supporter, the messages were not ones of sympathy for once again having fallen again at the final hurdle. Not even in the country at the time, O’Connor had a different interest in the game.
As Dean Rock stepped up to take what would be the decisive kick, Lee Keegan lobbed an object in the Dublin forward’s direction in desperate hope of causing sufficient distraction. Dublin’s party in full swing, it was realised what Keegan had used in an attempt to spoil it.
Keegan had thrown a GPS tracker – one provided by O’Connor’s company, STATSports.
Founded in 2008 by O’Connor and Alan Clarke – two lads from Dundalk – it has risen to become the world’s leading GPS player tracking company.
“We initially thought we’d be going to the Irish market, to GAA teams and rugby teams here, amateur teams,” O’Connor, the company’s Chief Operations Officer, told Balls.
… After the team’s 0-0 draw against Colombia on Jun 1, The Pharaohs’ Argentinian coach Hector Cuper said the Ramadan fast had “affected the players” performance.
Cuper’s comments came shortly after Egyptian superstar forward Mohamed Salah was injured while playing for Liverpool in the European Champions League final.
An observant Muslim, Salah decided not to fast ahead of the May 26 match in Kiev against Real Madrid – which Liverpool lost 3-1.
In the previous tutorial we learnt how to create a plot map background for use with Statsbomb data. Let’s use what we learn and then plot some shots for one particular game.
Recently there were a couple of threads on Twitter discussing the difficulties associated with learning d3.js. I’ve also seen this come up in many similar conversations I’ve had at meetups, conferences, workshops, mailing list threads and slack chats. While I agree that many of the difficulties are real, the threads highlight a common misconception that needs to be cleared up if we want to help people getting into data visualization.
… Given the advances of the tools, I polled a set of current and former NBA front-office executives and analysts to get a sense of which teams do the best job of incorporating analytics in an impactful way in their draft process. Some of the results of that poll were expected (Houston taking the top spot), but others were surprising and are evidence of Buford’s influence on the use of analytics in the NBA. Here are the top six teams, ranked by the impact of their usage of analytics in the draft process:
1. Houston Rockets: No surprise here that the Rockets were the only team mentioned by every person polled. Morey has championed the use of analytics in all areas of basketball decision-making, and his colleagues throughout the league recognize the value he has created there.